DVB Consumer Conditional Access Module

Conditional Access Modules
for use with DTV receivers

Through SmarDTV, Nagravision addresses the needs of the rapidly expanding market for removable security modules to be used in integrated digital television sets (iDTVs) and other media devices sold in the horizontal, open market. These devices feature a Common Interface (CI) into which a conditional access module (CAM) can be inserted, making the use of a separate decoder superfluous.

Fully integrated into Nagravision end-to-end solutions, the SmarDTV CAMs have proven interoperability with leading iDTV and set-top box manufacturers, and have been tested with over 100 different models throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Australia, providing reliable access to a wide range of popular Pay-TV services.

Nagravision, together with SmarDTV, cover all aspects of the CAM ecosystem, from the various flavors of the CAMs themselves, to the tools, adapters, chips, and software necessary to help partners such as CE device manufacturers and TV operators successfully utilize Nagravision CAMs in their products and services.

CAMs descramble a Pay-TV signal independent of the actual format of the underlying signal and so therefore, in principle, can provide access to content in any format, for instance MPEG-2, MPEG-4/H.264, SD and HD signals. In practice, of course, care must be taken to ensure that a particular CAM does implement the required format. In addition, as the CAM integrates the underlying Nagravision security technology, it is capable of enforcing content usage rules or other functionality such as parental control, typically enforced by the end-to-end content security system. SmarDTV is a world leader in the development and production of conditional access modules.

In addition to CAMs, SmarDTV designs and manufactures a range of highly secure, interchangeable modules and associated enabling technologies, which provide authorized access to scrambled television services. In 2007, the company sold more than 1.3 million CAMs throughout the world, representing a growth of 50% over the previous year.

Common Interface Plus
CI+ forum

The CI+ Forum was established to rapidly bring to market an enhanced specification for the Common Interface, in order to satisfy the most urgent market requirements for extensions to the existing CI Specification.

The primary objective of the CI+ Forum is to deliver an open specification that will act as a market enabler for secure delivery of Pay-TV services in a horizontal market for DTV Receivers. It is however the in the nature of security related work that there is sometimes a need to preserve elements of specifications from full public exposure. As a consequence, some parts of the CI+ Specification are deliberately excluded from public review and are only made available to legitimate licensees of the CI+ Specification.

Industry stakeholders are encouraged to participate in this public review of the CI+ Specification and to provide comments and feedback to the CI+ Forum by following the Specification link on this page.

The CI+ Forum is now working rapidly to establish the CI+ Trust Authority, as described in the recently published White Paper, which will allow all implementers of the CI+ Specification to register compliant products with the CI+ Trust Authority and launch CI+ certified products commercially in the market.

On behalf of the CI+ Forum we thank you for your interest in the work of the group, which looks forward to providing you further news very soon.